VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

FotoFest, the international non-profit arts and education organization based in Houston, Texas, joins with Arts Brookfield, a year-round free arts program sponsored by Brookfield Office Properties, to present a new exhibition of renowned Latin American photographers at Allen Center One and Two in Downtown Houston.

Faces of History - Latin America highlights important late 19th and early 20th Century photographers from five Latin American countries - Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico and Peru. Their works are a profile of change - the mass availability of photography as an instrument for personal portraiture and collective communication and the emergence of new social classes created by the industrial growth of the late 1800s and early 1900s in Latin America.

The exhibition opens June 6, 2011 in Allen Centers One and Two, with the opening Reception on Thursday June 9, 4-7pm in Allen Center One at 500 Dallas Street next to the Doubletree Hotel Houston Downtown. Faces of History - Latin America is on view June 6 - August 5, 2011 at Allen Center One (500 Dallas Street) and Allen Center Two (1200 Smith Street). Viewing hours are weekdays 8am-6pm, Monday - Friday, free of charge.

Faces of History - Latin America is a partnership between FotoFest and Arts Brookfield to present more visual art in downtown Houston. The exhibition, curated and organized by FotoFest for Allen Center by Senior Curator Wendy Watriss, features the work of Benjamín de la Calle (Colombia), Agustín Víctor Casasola (Mexico), Julio Cordero (Bolivia), Romualdo García (Mexico), Melitón Rodríguez (Colombia), Carlos and Miguel Vargas (Peru), and Juan José de Jesús Yas (Guatemala). These artists and their studios were important institutions in their time, recording life across economic and social lines, from native laborers to the wealthy and politically powerful, in these bustling, turn of the century, Latin American cities.

Pictured above:  Benjamin De Calle (Colombia), Carlos Alberto Suárez, San Sebastían, Cauca, Medellín Colombia, 1906.

Pictured below:

Juan José de Jesús Yas (1844-1917, Guatemala), Sin Título [untitled], Guatemala, c.1880-1916

Agustín Víctor Casasola (1874-1928, Mexico), Tropas federales antes de salir hacia La Laguna, para combatir a revolucionarios constitucionalistas, [Federal Government Troops Before Leaving for La Laguna to Fight Constitutionalists Revolutionarie], c. 1913

Julio Cordero (1879-1961, Bolivia), Husband and Wife [Pareja Chola], La Paz, Bolivia, c. 1915